13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A precious gem of a book not to be missed, January 12, 2008
This review is from: Moonlight Downs (Hardcover)
The author, Adrian Hyland, spent many years living and working with indigenous people in the Northern Territory; MOONLIGHT DOWNS is a story told with a great deal of affection for the people. Their spiritual connection to the land and its native animals is particularly well described. He makes no attempt to gloss over the dysfunctional aspects of life in the remoter areas of the Northern Territory, both European and Aboriginal.Emily regards her community with a mixture of deep love and exasperation at the destructiveness of some of the behaviour she witnesses.
There are other issues raised in the book. The inevitable clash of cultures and lack of understanding that results. Conflicting interests of farming, mining and aboriginal land claims, the politicization of these interests and the odd mix of people who seem to be attracted to such remote areas. The real achievement that Hyland has managed to pull off is the fact that he vividly portrays all these aspects of life in the outback without making any judgements and without trying to push the reader down the path towards a particular opinion. He leaves that entirely up to the individual.
Hyland has also injected a wonderful dry humour into the book. Expressions such as "rough as emus knees", "he belonged to the von Ribbentrop school of negotiation" and "been taking deportment lessons from a Rottweiler" are genuinely funny. The author also has a gift for description; " Gladys herself was a battleship on stilts. She wasn't much older than me, but she'd exploded in every direction. She was immensely tall, immensely fat, wearing a green dress and a coiffure that looked like it had been fashioned with a splitting axe."
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly original mystery from Australia, September 1, 2008
This review is from: Moonlight Downs (Hardcover)
"Moonlight Downs" is surely one of the more unusual mystery novels out there right now in that it is set in the wasteland of northern Australia, features a female sleuth who is half Aboriginal and half European and uses a lexicon of Australian English and Aboriginal expressions that will be completely unfamiliar to most non-Australian readers.
Author Adrian Hyland has fashioned a complex mystery story that does not sort itself until the final pages of the book. Meanwhile, protagonist Emily Tempest, travels many miles through the outback trying to find the murderer of an old family friend who was the revered leader of a small Aboriginal band trying to reestablish its traditional way of life in a wasteland oasis. The problems that Aboriginal people have living between European settlements and traditional encampments are well and sympathetically laid out as the story line uncoils.
The author thankfully provides a glossary of Aboriginal and Australian words and idioms at the outset of the book and be forewarned--you will have to access those references frequently until well into the book. This is an intelligent and interesting novel with a good mystery core that any reader of the genre will appreciate greatly.
Finally, kudos to SOHO Crime for continuing to delivery excellent international mysteries to the American market.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Rust was seeping into the soul of the community.", December 4, 2008
This review is from: Moonlight Downs (Hardcover)
(4.5 stars) Part white and part aborigine, Emily Tempest has "a foot in both camps." As a child living with the aborigines at Moonlight Downs while her white father worked at the Moonlight cattle station, Emily was a happy member of the community until she was fourteen, when her natural curiosity and tempestuous nature led her to violate a strong community taboo. Immediately, she was sent off to boarding school in Adelaide, her best friend, and partner in the violation, an aborigine, facing a worse penalty within the community. After starting three degrees (including law) and finishing none, she traveled the world, eventually finding her way back "home" for the first time in twelve years, just as Lincoln Flinders, the father of her best friend and the leader of the community, is found murdered. There is no dearth of motives.
The aborigine community has recently had its ancestral lands restored by the Australian courts after whites had appropriated it for cattle grazing and development, and resentful whites have been trying to buy or lease it back. Racial tensions and cultural conflicts underlie intercommunity relationships, and some of the aborigines' most sacred sites have been deliberately destroyed by whites. Aborigine youth who have lived in Bluebush, the nearest community, no longer feel the ties to the land that their parents and ancestors have had, and the community's future is threatened. Emily Tempest is determined to find out who murdered Lincoln Flinders, and she is in a unique position to do so, but she also has her enemies, both inside and outside the aborigine community.
Australian author Adrian Hyland, who won the Ned Kelly Award for this atmospheric and dramatic first novel, creates a narrative that moves at warp speed, filled with action and excitement. At the same time, he also invites contemplation of the natural world and the lives of the aborigines who identify with nature on a visceral, even mystical, level. Their needs are basic, their lives are not pretty, and their land is infertile, making their ability to be happy because of their culture and beliefs significant by contrast.
Hyland's dialogue is earthy, filled with aborigine and white slang (for which there is a glossary in the front), and he is often profane, preferring to show his characters and their lives as they really are, instead of the way an "overcivilized" reader might wish them to be. His remarkable ability to recreate the seemingly bleak North Australian landscape and the people who consider it "home" puts the reader in touch with life's most basic needs and the aborigine culture which has developed there. Despite its movie script ending, this unusual and captivating mystery, the first in a projected series, is one of my favorites for the year. n Mary Whipple
Daisy Bates in the Desert, a white woman's life among the aborigines
Sorry by Gail Jones, set in W. Australian bush
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